Czech BooksHearth and Horizon: cultural identity in a globalised world.

This week’s Czech Books visits the home of the distinguished philosopher
and author, Professor Erazim Kohák, to discuss his book, Hearth and
Horizon. After exile from Czechoslovakia in 1948, Professor Kohák had a
long academic career in the United States, and is Professor Emeritus at
Boston University. He returned to his native land in 1990, and since then
has continued to teach philosophy and write, is the recipient of the
highest academic and cultural honours, and is one of those who could truly
be called a public intellectual. Hearth and Horizon is his book about
cultural identity in a globalised world and in particular asks the question
- what does it mean to be Czech? I first asked Professor Kohák what the
impetus for writing the book had been.

Erazim Kohák
“Very personal indeed; I left my native country when I was not quite
fifteen years old, not voluntarily, as a refugee. And I had to decide
whether I wished to remain Czech, because when we came as farm labourers to
America - there the pressure is very great to become assimilated, to become
an American, or at least a Czech-American - at that point I decided I did
not wish to be an American, I wished to be a Czech, but I did not know what
that meant. So all my life I had to struggle with the question, what does
it mean to be Czech? And the problem that you run into is that Czech
history was broken at so many points; the discontinuity of Czech history
makes it very difficult to define one Czech identity. Our Czech identity is
very much a multifaceted one; being Czech is the task of welding together
all of these very varied elements.”

The title Hearth and Horizon I think refers to two great influences on the
formation of the Czech nation – the Enlightenment horizon and the
Romantic hearth.

“I simply love titles which can be interpreted in so many different
ways. Of course I thought nothing of the sort - what I wanted to express
was the dichotomy of the global and the local. Because right now the world
is becoming globalised; all our basic issues are global issues: ecology,
economy and world diplomacy - war and peace. These are global issues, and
yet while the future of humankind is global, the richness of being human is
always local. A language which has no cultural basis, an Esperanto, or
perhaps the English which is used as the language of communication in
Brussels, which has no cultural depth – these are people who have learnt
3,000 English words, and approximately twenty basic rules, and they can
communicate effectively - but the language carries no richness, the
richness of culture. And so the challenge to me is always, how do you
combine the global and local? But if I put that into a title I would be
written off as a hopeless, unimaginative Brussels bureaucrat. And so
instead of local and global I spoke of hearth and horizon.”

But you do refer specifically to the horizon of rationality, the desire
for freedom, which was inspired by the Enlightenment, and the profound
effect of Romanticism on the formation of the Czech nation.

“Yes, and here you have again the hearth and the horizon, the particular
and the universal; Romanticism was very particular, the Enlightenment tried
to be universal, and there you have again the polarity.”

Your book is written in a very beautiful and often poetic way. How great
an influence has literature had on your life and on your writing?

“Very much so – I learned the world through literature. But, when I
was first starting to learn English in a refugee camp there were no
textbooks. The only books in English that we managed to scrape together –
my father somehow managed to find a paperbound collected works of William
Shakespeare, with some pages missing, but most of them were still there,
then the camp administration provided us with a King James Bible, and some
British trooper left behind The Book of Common Prayer. So in my first two
years of learning English these were my only texts. And when I arrived on a
farm in North America as a labourer, my fellow labourers, well, were a bit
startled by the English I spoke because I spoke a fairly passable
Elizabethan English.”

One of your chapters in the book, which gives a sweeping review of Czech
history, it’s very valuable from this point of view, focuses on the first
president of Czechoslovakia, Masaryk, who is a really iconic figure in the
Czech Republic. If Masaryk came back today, how do you think he would feel
about Czech politics and the progress of the European ideal?

“Masaryk’s feelings were always a mystery to me because he managed to
keep them so well out of sight. So, how he would feel about Czech politics,
my guess would be that he would be privately disgusted. But then it’s no
worse than Czech politics in the days of Austro-Hungary. Czech democracy
between 1860 and 1918 was very much like this. So he would not be
surprised, he would probably say, we need to grow into being democrats.
What would become of him? Well, George Bernard Shaw said that if there ever
is a European union there is only one man who could be its president, and
that’s Tomáš Masaryk.”

Tomáš Garrigue MasarykIn the book you conclude with some comments on the Czech society that you
found when you returned in 1990. One phrase you used about certain elements
in Czech society was ‘profound shallowness’, even though you pit it
against a knowledge that many people, many young people, are engaged in
less selfish, less consumerist pursuits in civic organizations. So do you
feel optimistic, do you feel there’s room for optimism in the way Czech
society has developed since 1989?

“The problem here is that the past regimes have discredited any idealism
because they appealed to it in the form of ideology. And, together with a
total disgust with ideology, the Czechs have managed to flush away all
ideals also. Therefore, it’s very difficult to speak with a straight face
of ideals. So, instead we speak of the latest automobile. This is why I
spoke of the society being shallow all the way down – profoundly shallow.
But there is in this society also the centuries of tradition, ever since
Jan Hus, and even before Hus, from the mid-fourteenth century, a moral
earnestness, a quest for truth – and this does not mean putting our
particular belief as the one thing to believe, but rather a certain quest
for moral rightness, and I believe this will come out again. In this sense
it was a profoundly religious nation, when religion was the idiom of the
age, all through the Renaissance, then in a peculiar way even in the
Baroque age. The church managed to discredit religion, just as the Party
managed to discredit the idea of social justice, and what remains,
Ecclesiastes tells us - to eat, drink, and usually throws in, enjoy the
pleasures of your wife, and this is profoundly shallow.”

The idea of the Czech community – cultural community is the phrase you
use rather than the idea of nation – do you think it’s possible for it
again to have a more multicultural idea of itself. Because I think there is
rather a lot of xenophobic or nationalistic feeling.

Jan Hus statue in Prague
“That, it seems to me, is the great temptation, the great danger, what
we have to struggle with consciously and constantly. But our young people
do not have a tendency towards that closedness. Those who are aware of the
richness of our culture are also open to other cultures. They start out by
learning German, but then they read Goethe; they out start learning
English, and, just by the way, they start reading Shakespeare. And I wish
they would start reading the Book of Common Prayer because some of the
loveliest English is there. But, I believe that if we can foster our
culture we will also be able to foster our openness, because xenophobia
always comes from lack of self-confidence. If our young people are
confident in their own culture, they do not have to be hostile to the
culture of others. Because notice, the people who now use the slogan,
“Nothing but Czech”, these are the neo-Nazis, are also people who
cannot even speak Czech correctly, much less know something of the history
of the culture.”

Your book ends with a discussion of the period we’re in now, when the
‘grand narratives’, as they’re called, have failed, and you discuss
these and suggest a new paradigm could be of ecological responsibility. Can
you say something more about what you mean by this?

“I should tell you that in Czech I rewrote the ending because I thought
the ecological paradigm was not strong enough to carry all that I had
wanted it to say. But what I wanted to point out is that the
irresponsibility of the profound superficiality cannot deal with the basic
problems of the time, which I believe to be the problems of - firstly, how
can humankind, which is ever more numerous and ever more demanding survive
in a finite space? Secondly, how can humankind survive, polarised between
the rich, who are becoming absurdly rich, and the poor, who are becoming
desperately poor? And the third question is – how can humankind survive
when it has no way of solving its problems other than by fighting wars. And
wars are ecologically absolutely insupportable.”

One short piece I’ll just quote now is about our contemporary society
and this seems to tie into the idea you mention of the paradigm of
ecological responsibility.

We resemble nothing as much as a crew in the gondola of a lighter-than-air
balloon who rip strips of cloth from their balloon to line their gondola
for greater comfort.

Erazim Kohák with his wife DorothyYou start off in the introduction to this book, which you call an
unconventional volume, with the questions - what does it mean to be Czech
and, is there any point? With your experience since you’ve returned, and
you have been here now for twenty years again, do you feel that have the
answers to these questions?

“Yes, I believe I have the answers very clearly. What it means to be
Czech is to participate in the cultural richness, both drawing on its past
and adding to its future. One can be Czech simply as props on a stage, but
if one truly wants to be a Czech it means to participate actively, both in
drawing on the cultural heritage and contributing to it. Is there any point
to it? Absolutely. The more global the world becomes, the more humankind is
reduced to the lowest common denominator, to the universal - this is where
consumerism comes in. Therefore, the more global the world becomes, and it
is becoming more global, the more important it is to preserve the richness;
a good metaphor is the richness of literature in a language or the richness
of folksong. The point of being someone in particular is the richness of
culture; the point of being universally human is that we would not end up
fighting until we exterminate each other.”

Thank you very, very much.

“You are very, very welcome.”

I’ll be giving information on the website about how your book can be
obtained, and I’ll also give some other links in English so people can
find out more about your other books that have already been translated into
English.

The best way to get Hearth and Horizon is via the kosmas.cz book distributor - they have a service in English and will be happy to distribute it to any address globally - contact: www.kosmas.cz/about.asp

Other books in English by Professor Kohák, which are available via
Amazon.com, include:

The Embers and the Stars

The Green Halo:A Bird’s Eye View of Ecological Ethics

Jan Patočka: Philosophy and Selected Writings

More information about Professor Kohák, including a complete bibliography
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